london
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Since the change is so big, it may be acceptable for the messages to become garbled.
US President Donald Trump is considering sending Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, Vice President J.D. Vance has announced.
“We’re talking about this right now,” Vance told “Fox News Sunday,” adding that Trump would make the “final decision.”
Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, said on the same day that he believes Ukraine has the authority to strike deep into Russia. “Use your ability to hit deep,” he said. “There is no such thing as sanctuary.” Mr. Kellogg later clarified that his remarks were merely a reference to public statements from Mr. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and did not offer any new insight into White House thinking. But either the Trump campaign is seriously considering supplying the Tomahawk (its very nature means it’s really only for long-range strikes against Russia), or it wants everyone to think it is.
43 days ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin walked the red carpet at The Beast in Alaska. But now the Kremlin must respond to the idea that America’s most effective long-range missile, which President Trump said just seven months ago was “not in the cards,” would be supplied to an enemy nation. It comes days after President Trump posted on social media that Ukraine could take back all occupied territory, another policy, but a long-range one.
First made famous during the 1991 Gulf War, the tomahawk is reserved for America’s closest allies, including Britain and Japan. Available in four models up to the latest version, Block IV, it can feed back live information about the following targets and allows for mid-flight changes: The US did not intend to supply the weapons, instead selling them to Europe and giving them to Kiev. But without question, this does not allay Kremlin concerns that the Trump administration is significantly escalating and improving Ukraine’s capabilities here.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said little about what he calls “sensitive topics.” He knows that Ukraine has already used long-range drones to damage Russian refineries and that gas shortages in the country are common knowledge. Apparently, Kiev is already able to attack deep in Russia, where the war was supposed to be far away, in areas where poor people fought and died. They showed that ingenuity can replace pure force and technology by using small drones hidden in container housing to attack a Siberian airfield in Operation Spiderweb. However, the Tomahawk will pose a new challenge to Russia’s air defenses. Moscow’s government buildings and the magnificent Ministry of Defense infrastructure could become vulnerable targets.
Are plans moving forward against what tacticians call “strategic ambiguity”? Is it possible that Ukraine’s growing arsenal of long-range missiles should be acknowledged as responsible for the Tomahawk attack, or vice versa? Missile fragments likely point to the real culprit. It is unlikely that U.S. involvement will remain hidden, and the Russian government will be forced to attempt a similar response.
But there are two moments in the past that perhaps help predict where this new threat escalation will lead. The first is Washington’s last major arms buildup to Ukraine. The Biden administration’s decision to allow Kiev to launch an ATACM deep into Russia. Putin responded by firing a new Oleshnik missile into a largely empty warehouse in Dnipro.
This device sounded scary. It was an apparently new nuclear-capable IRBM that the Kremlin boasted could fire with multiple conventional warheads and could penetrate Europe’s defenses. Ukrainian experts claim the device is a variation of an older model RS26 and showed us what appears to be an aging valve in its circuit at a storage facility in Kiev. In short, it appears to have been neither a major technological advance nor an incredible show of force, but rather the gentle rattle of nuclear-adjacent sabers in response to undeniable US escalation. After three and a half years of war, Russia’s resources are so stretched that any use of the Tomahawk could lead to an equally ineffective response.
The second precedent is less favorable to Ukraine. The last time the Trump administration threatened to escalate beyond its predecessor was to impose secondary sanctions on India and China for buying Russian oil, in response to months of disloyal Russian diplomacy. Imposing such broad tariffs would have been a more drastic action than Joe Biden had in mind. In fact, a 50% tariff is currently being imposed on India. But if President Trump went further, he demanded that Europe stop buying Russian hydrocarbons. He has so far been restrained.
This may be the fate of the Tomahawk controversy. That said, when it comes to President Trump’s “final resolve,” he is following his usual habit of suspending his most destructive measures and maintaining a relationship that seems mysteriously durable: his friendship with Putin.
